Full-day care and early learning in Silver Spring, Maryland, for children six weeks to twelve years. Now enrolling in all four programs.
On August 10th we threw the doors open for our Open House: every room on show, the whole team in their EduCastle shirts, and a treats table that did not survive the afternoon. To every family who came, asked the hard questions and let us show off a little — thank you. The turnout beat anything we had planned for.
Missed it? The tour is the open house, any weekday you like.
Schedule a TourOur director’s children’s book, STEM Explorers: Discover, Create, and Learn!, is out now — the same try-it-and-see thinking your child gets in our classrooms, in a book you can read at home.
Find it on AmazonMs. Sana writes about early learning as it actually happens: STEM with household items, first-day tears, and what curiosity looks like at three.
Read the blog
EduCastle is a licensed early learning center on Pear Tree Lane in Silver Spring, for children from six weeks through twelve years. Four programs, each in their own rooms, each with a teaching team that stays together for the whole year, so your child isn't starting over with a new adult every few months.
The days are hands-on. Children pour and measure, build ramps to find out which car goes furthest, sound out words on the carpet, and argue about whose turn it is until they work it out. Teachers plan around what the children are already curious about, which is how the block corner ends up being a hospital one week and a bus depot the next.
And we keep you close to all of it. You'll get photos and a short note during the day, and a real conversation at pickup, including on the days that were hard.
What a six-month-old needs and what a six-year-old needs have almost nothing in common, so we don't pretend otherwise. Each room is set up, staffed and planned for the children in it.
6 weeks – 17 months
Infants
Your baby's own schedule, not ours. Feeding and sleeping on demand, tummy time, songs, and a great deal of being carried around.
See the room
18 – 23 months
Toddlers
Busy hands and enormous feelings. Climbing, first words, deliberately messy sensory play, and the beginnings of doing it themselves.
See the room
2 – 5 years
Preschool & Pre-K
Letters and numbers, experiments that make a mess, and the hard work of learning how to be a friend. The runway into kindergarten.
See the room
5 – 12 years
School-Age
Before and after school. Homework gets done first, then it's building, games, and being off duty for a while.
See the roomFour things. Every project and every question a teacher asks ladders back to one of them.
Ramps, magnets, water tables and simple coding games. Children guess what will happen, try it, and find out they were wrong. That is the point.
Letters and sounds, counting, holding a pencil, sitting through a whole story. The unglamorous skills kindergarten teachers ask for.
Art with no model to copy. Instruments played badly and very loudly. Cardboard for building something far too big for the room.
Naming a feeling before it turns into a bite. Waiting, sharing, and getting back up after a bad morning.
Young children settle when they know what is coming next. The shape of our day barely changes from week to week. What happens inside it changes constantly.
Indoor activities as children arrive, a morning stretch, then breakfast served by the center.
Morning meeting, the week’s theme in a whole group, outdoor play, then small-group centers.
Packed lunches from home, kept cold and warmed up, eaten together while everyone practices cleaning up after themselves.
Nap or quiet activities for non-sleepers, then an afternoon snack from the center.
News and sharing time, storytime, a second block outside, music and movement, a late snack, and a recap for every family at the door.
The real Monday-to-Friday rhythm, condensed from the parent handbook. Infants follow their own feeding and sleeping schedules.
Not a gimmick painted on afterwards. A three-year-old who is nervous about the hallway is much braver about Dragon’s Pass, and a child who has spent a year in the Squires’ Stable knows exactly what moving up to the Knights’ Academy means.
Every classroom door carries its own coat of arms and its own colour, and every child belongs to a house: Lionheart, Dragonfire, Unicorn, Falcon, Griffin or Stag. It is the same idea as the pop-up castle at the top of this page: the building is a story your child is inside, and they know their part in it.
Almost every child cries at drop-off at some point, and almost every parent sits in the car park afterwards feeling terrible. So we don't do day one all at once: when it helps, we use a gradual six-day transition plan, adjusted to your child.
On day one you and your child visit the classroom together for about an hour while the room is running, then go home. No goodbye to survive yet.
Over the next few days the visits grow: a couple of hours, then staying for lunch, then making it through naptime, with teachers telling you how each step went.
By day six most children walk in like they run the place. And the whole first two weeks are a trial period for both sides, so you can be sure the fit is right.
Real photographs of the rooms, taken before the children arrived. Want the full walk-through instead? Take the tour of the castle.
What parents say when we ask them how the first month went.
“She walks in every morning and doesn’t look back. Three months in she was counting to twenty and explaining magnets to her grandfather. That’s all I wanted.”
“Leaving a four-month-old was the hardest thing I’ve done. The photos during the day and the honesty at pickup got us through the first month.”
“Homework is finished before I get there, and he still has time to build something ridiculous out of cardboard. I don’t know how they manage both.”
Weekdays during normal hours, or Saturday and Sunday by appointment. Half an hour, no tidying up beforehand. Bring your child, meet the teachers, and ask us the awkward questions.
